1 out of 5

Director: David Twohy

A good concept that was slipped between posturing and cool images, ‘Pitch Black’ has the magic of leaving a lingering taste of a good flick, but an actual viewing reminds how bland and thin and cliche-filled it actually is.  Part of this has to do with Diesel.  I appreciate the man having his fans, and I also think that his breed of acting and swagger can be properly applied, such as in ‘Boiler Room.’  But purposefully casting him as the anti-hero badarse and fluffing his masculine dreams with one-liners and sleeve-less t’s posed against back-lit expanses tilts Pitch Black into B territory, which would ALSO be fine except the movie can’t fully commit to that, wanting to lean into hard sci-fi and/or go for the legit terror of Alien.  Which crosses into the other part that fails: the era in which this was made, when CG in movies was just finding its way; when the dashes of effects and violence were becoming expectations but they still had that off look to them.  This encourages Twohy to drop glimpses of our attackers early on in quick-cut format, and while it saves some reveal shots for later, there’s no true sense of build or discovery.  All of this is a shame for some of the thought put into our creatures and concept.  PB opens with a transport ship getting knocked about, waking its crew from cryo-sleep, and causing Radha Mitchell to make a quick decision about ditching excess weight (as in the majority of the passengers) before the ship crashes on the nearby planet.  The opening is skillfully handled, smoothly intro-ing us to our principles in concise ways to tell us their personalities and lurches from quiet space travel to thrills on the dime upon which it was designed.  But once crashed, the squabbling cliches begin, and we step too quickly through too many interesting details – perpetual sunlight on the planet, different light sources displayed through different camera filters (part of that ‘unimportant but looks cool’ mentality that shaped the flick) – to, again, have any sense of build.  And before you know it, Vin is flashing us glowing contacts and dropping one liners.  Some moments hint at some balls in the scripting, but it gets subverted in favor of keeping us rooting for a lead.  One star might seem harsh, but there’s simply no part of the film that really works for me, literally every quality “almost” amounting to something, but not quite, making it rather, on the whole, unsatisfying to watch.

And years later, you remember some blue filters, and some interesting creature design, and think – maybe PB is an underdog, and gets better without any expectations.  Nope.  No.  There was a reason you weren’t impressed the first time through, and a second time through ain’t gonna’ change that.